Stand with Sen. Warren: Investigate Airbnb-style rentals

Sign the petition

Petition to Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Edith Ramirez:

"Investigate the extent to which the short-term rental market on services like Airbnb consists of people running businesses by renting multiple residences simultaneously, potentially exacerbating housing shortages and driving up rents."

There is a rental housing crisis in America. Millions more people look for apartments each year, even as the housing supply decreases. More and more Americans devote nearly half their income to paying rent. Americans struggle as their rent goes up and their wages don’t – and low-income Americans suffer the worst.1

One part of the problem may be speculators buying up housing units and putting them on short-term rental platforms, like Airbnb. These platforms were intended to let people rent out single rooms or their own houses. But some hosts offer multiple units of entire apartments, in essence running their own hotels and leaving long-term renters with fewer and more expensive options.2

The biggest obstacle to dealing with it is we don’t know how widespread the problem is, and we can’t count on the companies themselves to be honest.3,4That’s why Sen. Elizabeth Warren is teaming up with Sens. Brian Schatz and Dianne Feinstein to demand that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigate and uncover the truth about speculators on short-term rental markets.

The idea behind platforms like Airbnb, HomeAway, VRBO, and FlipKey is for people to rent out a room or their own house, and earn a few extra bucks. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem arises when individuals or companies start renting out multiple units. Speculators may be buying up apartments, taking them off the market, and renting them out short-term, effectively running hotels that don’t meet state or local safety rules. There is also controversy over whether those landlords are then paying the required taxes.

By reducing the housing supply, the people profiting off of short-term rental platforms may be driving up rents for everyone.5 And even if someone could afford to live long-term in an Airbnb apartment, there have been a flurry of reports of black users being denied housing and an academic study that found that people with “black-sounding” names were less likely to be approved as guests.6

Airbnb was recently caught purging 1,000 properties from its platform in New York City in order to hide how many hosts were running businesses.7 So we can’t trust the companies themselves to come clean about how big a problem this really is. That’s why Sens. Warren, Schatz, and Feinstein have demanded that the FTC dig in and get the facts – and why we need to stand with them.

If short-term rental platforms are limiting the supply of rental units and driving up prices, then policymakers in Congress and local government will need to do something about it. But right now, the best data we have is from New York City, where a study found that only 6 percent of the hosts generated 37 percent of the revenue, and 72 percent of units were in violation of local laws.8 If those numbers hold true across the country, that’s a big issue.

The first step to fixing the problem is understanding the problem. That’s why we need to stand with Sen. Warren and tell the FTC to investigate the short-term rental market.